Page 6 - Mobile World Daily - Day 3

NEWS
Pebble steps up
product rollout
to ditch
'accessory' status
By Ronan Shields
Pebble is stepping up its
product rollout, with the
manufacturer using Mobile
World Congress (MWC) to
announce its second product
launch in a week, plus what it
claims is the sector’s first “hardware days of battery life and is
accessory platform” that lets sensor
manufacturers build “smart straps”
that can communicate with
smartwatches.
The smartwatch manufacturer
revealed that it has extended its
Pebble Time series, with the
addition of Pebble Time Steel
(pictured), a device unveiled by
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky during
an MWC conference session
focusing on Wearables that took
place yesterday.
Pebble Time Steel is available on
TD-LTE hailed as
industry saviour
By Joseph Waring
TD-LTE will become the
“saviour” of the mobile
industry as it faces massive
data growth, proclaimed Bharti
Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal.
“At the time we joined the GTI
[Global TD-LTE Initiative] as a
founder member, we didn’t realise
how mission critical it would be. We
started to take baby steps and
monitor what China Mobile was
doing,” he said.
Speaking at the GTI Summit
yesterday at Mobile World
Congress, Mittal said: “I can’t
imagine our lives without the big
development of the TDD
ecosystem, given that India has just
5MHz of 3G spectrum to serve the
very large capacity of its
customers.”
GSMA chairman Jon Fredrik
Baksaas said TD-LTE has seen the
fastest adoption rate of any
consumer technology. In June last
year TD-LTE connections made up
just 7 per cent of all LTE
connections. “Now it’s closer to 25
per cent, and next year when LTE
connections reach one billion, it will Technology, said China’s three
account for almost 30 per cent.”
The fact that TDD and FDD
PAGE 6 Wednesday 4th March
Kickstarter – a crowdfunding
platform where users ‘pledge’ funds
to a project up until they have
reached their target – for $250, and
is the second such device it has
made public in a week.
The latest update has up to 10
manufactured with stainless steel,
plus optional leather, or steel straps, device,” he said.
with the device to start shipping in
July. Migicovsky also said updates
are available to those that had
‘pledged’ to the previously
announced Time device.
In addition, Pebble has also
debuted what it calls the industry
vertical’s first “hardware accessory
port” initiative, that lets
smartwatch accessory makers
build watch straps containing
sensors that can transfer data to
apps running on its devices.
share common technologies and
have merged on common chipsets
and devices “means that the entire
LTE ecosystem has flourished,”
added Baksaas.
He said operators will continue to
invest heavily in both TDD and
FDD as they roll out their next-
generation networks and look for
ways to monetise their investments.
“As we look to the future, the
inter-dependence between the two
is only going to grow, especially as
carrier aggregation becomes more
common. And FDD is being
optimised for use in M2M
applications.”
He also said 2015 will be the year
when we see VoLTE become
mainstream, with the support of
more devices.
Meanwhile ITU Secretary
General Zhao Houlin encouraged
China and other GTI partners to
promote the advantages of
unpaired spectrum to a wider range
of services.
Li Li, deputy director general of
China’s Department of Science and
mobile operators have worked
together to “give TDD a unique
advantage in the 2.6GHz band to
make it possible to operate
These “smart straps”, as
Migicovsky calls them, signify a
significant milestone for the
industry vertical, as it is the first
time such a service has been made
on wearable devices.
He added: “Pebble is no longer
just an accessory to your phone, it
is its own unique computing
The new hardware platform is
“open”, meaning all developers, or
“hackers”, are able to build on top
of it, and then make device
efficiently with synchronisation,
without the need for a guard band
between two frequency ranges.”
He noted that this is a big booster
of frequency resource utilisation.
“We also are very supportive of the
TDD-FDD convergence and related
applications.”
TD-LTE terminals last year
accounted for 40 per cent of all sales
in the country and China is on track
to have 400 million LTE connections
by the end of this year, he said.
While 4G has made huge gains in
China in just one year, he said there
are a number of upstream and
downstream challenges, such as the
incomplete maturity of VoLTE and
hybrid communications.
China Mobile executive VP Sha
Yuejia said its 4G buildout has
progressed even faster than it had
imagined, ending 2014 with more
than 90 million 4G subscribers. He
noted that the ARPU of its 4G
customers is 1.46 times that of 3G
users, while data usage per user
increased over threefold.
China’s mobile leader offers
more than 1,300 4G devices from
about 200 vendors. The price of
4G handsets has dropped to as low
as $60.
He said it is aiming to cover all
domestic cities and rural areas with
one million 4G base stations by the
end of this year. Coverage will also
include 73 high-speed railways and
26,000 km of highways.
It expects to have 250 million 4G
customers and sell 200 million 4G
devices this year.
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS DAILY 2015 | www.mobileworldcongress.com
accessories equipped with
functions such as GPS tracking
that can be attached directly to a
Pebble device.
“We believe that in the future
sensor manufacturers will not have
to create their own smartwatches
just to bring their sensors to market.
They can integrate them into a
thriving and active community of
people that want to see their
smartwatch do more,” he told
attendees.
Migicovsky also said he believed
NGMN unveils 5G
operator wishlist
By Paul Rasmussen
A5G White Paper unveiled by
the Next Generation Mobile
Networks (NGMN) Alliance
aims to settle industry debate over
the technology’s future standards.
Following a decision late last
year by the NGMN board of more
than 20 operator CTOs, a team of
100 technical specialists were
asked to contribute towards
defining the end-to-end
requirements for 5G. The resulting
White Paper, according to the
NGMN, now presents a
consolidated view of operator
requirements intended to support
the standardisation and
subsequent availability of 5G for
2020 and beyond.
“The White Paper provides
essential and long expected input for
the work of many industry bodies”,
said Peter Meissner, CEO of the
NGMN Alliance. “Together with our
global partners from within industry
and research, we will now focus on
setting up and implementing a 5G
work-programme ensuring that
future solutions will meet our
ambitious targets.”
The NGMN document states it
would like to see any 5G ecosystem
as being global, lacking in
smartwatches will become
indispensable to consumers, but did
concede that this was unlikely to
“happen overnight”, although he did
express his opinion that such devices
could exceed smartphones in terms
of popularity in the long-run.
“With smartwatches now, you
can start to get things done from
your wrist, without having to take
your phone out… It’s about not
forcing the user to change their
habits around the device,” he
added.
“we will now focus
on setting up and
implementing a 5G
work-programme
ensuring that future
solutions will meet
our ambitious
targets.”
fragmentation and open to
innovation. However, while
conceding that commercial
deployments timescales will vary
across the operator community, it
urges 5G availability by 2020.
The White Paper is set for open
discussion at the NGMN industry
conference in Frankfurt this
month. However, equipment
vendors have been calling for open
collaboration across industry
sectors for some time.
“We want the standardisation of
5G to be done differently to past
efforts,” said Ken Hu, Huawei’s
rotating CEO, at Tuesday’s keynote
presentation at Mobile World
Congress. “There should be a better
understanding of the particular
requirements of vertical industries
and improved communication
between interested parties.”